‘Yaka and the Unrandomness of Retail Murder’ by Yak Handa

The sexual assault and mutilation of a young student in Delhi has drawn condemnation by capitalist mass-media, world over. Even the UN’s Moon flashed his selective beams on how Indians cast women.
There was less coverage of the pushing and crushing by an oncoming New York subway-train of an Indian man on December 27, by a white woman. Erika Menendez was looking to kill a “Hindu or a Muslim,” saying she wanted revenge for the 9/11 attacks!

In the Delhi case, the media, and those minions they trumpet as ‘spokesmen,’ compete with each other in calling for immediate capital-punishment of accused perpetrators. It’s almost like Mafioso capos, ordering the assassination of hitmen to cover up the trail of electronic echoes and leaden residues that inevitably lead to their own fingerprints and vocal-cords.

With victim and criminal out of the way, this media will soon manipulate this broadcast trauma into reproducing the same old days of ‘business as usual.’ Read that as the daily wholesale-mutilation by European nations and their settler-states’ aerial-bombers which strike from the highest altitudes to ground-zero. Yet daily retail-violence usually occurs both within and between adjacent class fractions, those closest, not the so-called uppermost vs the lowliest. Such violence occurs between people known to each other, as family members, neighbors or coworkers, especially when enforcing old hierarchies of inequity.

The seemingly random nature of the Delhi and NY attacks added to its horror. Yet the media hinted at class war, portraying the victim as a medical-student and the criminals ‘from the slums.’
The same media hotly condemns the subway-pusher too, as they do the Delhi attackers. But Erika is described as “mentally unstable” – the usual analysis for such crimes involving white criminality. For Black people, Asians, etc, more political or primordial causes are ascribed.

The English media is long famed for casting black men as congenital-rapists – a popular theme that goes back to early slavery days. Yet such acts against women occur in all communities and countries, and are perhaps more common among the middle/upper classes who hide such acts more easily. The media rarely highlights the widespread violence by white men against white women, or even Jewish men against Jewish women. Hate is a bank with many ATMs offering a bouquet of venomous currencies. One is misogyny, the hatred of women.

A day after the BBC and their ventriloquist-hacks splashed headlines of Pakistani men targeting white girls, English police launched nationwide marches protesting budget-cuts. Yet the same BBC was later accused of suppressing news about the deadly use of their studios as sites of decades-long abuse of girls by one of their superstars! No media recalled that the first BBC Director-General Lord Reith’s penchant for young boys led him to have a fountain built outside its headquarters with naked cherubs pissing into a public trough.

Blame for these most-recent acts of ‘retail’ murder should lead us to the very same media that misinforms us while arousing more violence, that portrays women either as heroic mothers or helpless victims, either as a Virgin Mary or a whore, or as prizes for successful consumption.

This same media that gave repeated play to clear distortions of the Mayan culture’s calendar, insisting the world could end December 21st! The same media that for decades have demonized by-the-minute, brown Asians in turbans – Muslim, Sikh or Pathan don’t matter.

The media broadcast the white subway-shover’s insistence that killing a Hindu or a Muslim was revenge for the Twin-Tower demolition. She could call Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington to join her defense team. Huntington’s long been allowed to loudly insist what the world’s witnessing is the old “clash of civilizations.”

History Anew

Did the Mayans predict Huntington’s pupil Fukuyama would be promoted for declaring “The End of History” about 1989?! All we’ve witnessed ever since history’s-end has been a rather one-sided clash, with millions of Asians and Africans murdered, many times, wholesale.

In the Delhi incident, described by media as isolated, the usual response claims surprise, etc. But many Delhi residents claim public attacks on women are long too common. Yet every inch of road is otherwise accounted for. Thanks to Caltex/ Ford-friendly privatizations, thanks to the car-finance companies, all routes of our largely privatized transport systems are highly controlled by owners who must deploy thugs and swift violence to maintain their monopoly. Passengers have to be treated with sheer contempt. The primary ‘joyriders’ charged with the killing included a ‘private’ school bus driver, and his brother. It profits the corporate media to conceal the traumatic depths of what their economic and social policies have created in our societies, then round up the usual suspects to cast blame, vent spleen, and reproduce the violence. Who bankrolls the slumdog millionaires? Yaka asks, guess who they are really protecting?